IBM wraps fat tentacles around fluffy clouds

IBM will splash $300m on 13 new data centres in 10 countries in its latest bid to fluff up cloud computing.

The tech giant announces the plans later today, but the pre-briefings show the centres are to be used for disaster recovery. Customers will house their back-ups in data vaults, which they can access very quickly over the web, in the event of a business continuity failure. Apparently, this is much cheaper than the the data mirroring of yore.

IBM has been reaching deep into its sizeable pockets all year, hungrily gobbling up storage start-ups. That sent a clear signal about the company’s intentions to climb aboard the cloud.

Since the start of 2008 it has bought Softek, NovusCG, XIV, Arsenal Digital Solutions, Diligent and FilesX.

Earlier this month IBM spent $360m on a data centre at its Research Triangle Park facility in North Carolina, and an undisclosed sum on a smaller farm in Japan, to gain a bigger foothold in the increasingly crowded cloud computing services market. ®